All the magnificent museums of the Gallerie d’Italia will also offer the public the opportunity to visit them at no cost tomorrow.
Sunday 3 July, the appointment returns with free admission to the Intesa Sanpaolo museums, in line with the initiative of the Ministry of Culture which provides free access to state museums on the first Sundays of the month.
A range of opportunities to discover the new headquarters of the Gallerie d’Italia in Naples and Turin revisited by the architect Michele De Lucchi, explore the novelties of the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan and Vicenza, in the museum spaces of Galleria degli Alberti in Prato, open recently to the public, and of the Ivan Bruschi House Museum in Arezzo.
In Milan, great success of the exhibition I Marmi Torlonia. Collecting Masterpieces. The Torlonia Marbles. Collecting Masterpieces which offers 96 marbles from the Torlonia Collection, the most important private collection of classical statuary in the world. The itinerary analyzes the history of antiquity collecting in Rome from the 15th to the 19th century, an aspect that highlights the exceptional importance, together with the astonishing beauty, of the sculptures of the Torlonia Museum. The Milanese appointment, until 18 September 2022, inaugurates – after Rome – the exhibition program of the Collection at important international museums.
Sculpture is also the protagonist in the Garden of Alessandro, Manzoni’s favorite place, where the exhibition Collezione Henraux 1960-1970 is hosted until July 17, curated by Edoardo Bonaspetti, Artistic Director of the Henraux Foundation. The exhibition is dedicated to the significant collection of marble sculptures created by the Tuscan marble company. Also set up in the Octagonal Courtyard, the exhibition displays seven of the twenty-five Henraux sculptures in the Intesa Sanpaolo collection, with works by Joan Miró, Jean Arp, Giò Pomodoro. On the occasion of the exhibition, the entire nucleus of sculptures was subjected to an important conservative intervention.
Photography is also on stage at the Milan Galleries, with nineteen palettes belonging to great painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – indirect portraits of the artists and their production – immortalized by the German photographer and artist Matthias Schaller. The Matthias Schaller exhibition. Das Meisterstuck, set up in the Sala delle Colonne and open to visitors until 28 August, intends the palettes as windows overlooking the artist’s creative genius, as an abstract landscape of pictorial production, or, in other words, painting before painting.
Also of great fascination for the public are the itineraries dedicated to the permanent collections, From Canova to Boccioni and Cantiere del Novecento, which wind along the three historic buildings that give life to the Intesa Sanpaolo museum overlooking Piazza Scala.
In Turin, at Palazzo Turinetti, the new Gallerie d’Italia in Piazza San Carlo, over 10,000 square meters spread over five floors, will offer two important photographic exhibitions set up in the underground floors of the museum until 4 September; on the main floor, a precious nucleus of Piedmontese Baroque works of art – including the nine canvases of the Oratory of the Compagnia di San Paolo – make up the permanent collection of the museum.
The exhibition The fragile wonder. A journey into changing nature, tells the story of Paolo Pellegrin’s work in the relationship between man and his natural environment, with the curation of Walter Guadagnini and the contribution of Mario Calabresi. A project that engaged the photographer for over a year, and which saw him move in different areas of the world in search of traces and the presence of the four elements – earth, water, air and fire.
The exhibition From the war to the moon 1945-1969. Sguardi dall’Archivio Publifoto Intesa Sanpaolo, curated by Aldo Grasso and Giovanna Calvenzi, through a selection of about 80 shots, tells of Italy reborn from the rubble of the Second World War, the Marshall Plan with which America helps it to start again, the boom of the 60s and the advent of television, mass motorization and the dreams linked to the conquest of the moon.
In Vicenza, great success of the Illustrissimo exhibition. Christoph Niemann, dedicated to the international star guest of Illustri Festival, a biennial initiative with temporary exhibitions and a rich program dedicated to the world of illustration in various places in the city. The exhibition, at the Gallerie d’Italia in Vicenza until 28 August, presents over 200 works by the German illustrator and artist that trace a large part of his production. His work appears regularly on the covers of The New Yorker – for which he also created the first augmented reality cover – National Geographic and The New York Times Magazine. The first solo show in Italy of the artist, considered at the highest levels in the world panorama, the exhibition is enriched by a multimedia system including a virtual reality experience that immerses visitors in some environments revisited by the extraordinary illustrator.
The permanent collection of the museum dedicated to the eighteenth century Veneto, with paintings by Canaletto, Guardi, Carlevarijs, and the extraordinary Fall of the Rebel Angels – a sculptural group of over sixty figures carved in a single block of Carrara marble – and the extraordinary collection of Russian icons, one of the most conspicuous and important collections of Russian sacred art existing outside the borders of Russia.
In Naples, the new headquarters of the Gallerie d’Italia in via Toledo offers an extraordinary «trip to Italy» until 26 September with over 200 works in the Restituzioni exhibition. Fragility and Strength which concludes the nineteenth edition of the restoration program which, in over 30 years of history, has returned to the community over 2000 works belonging to the country’s heritage. On show in this edition 87 groups of works belonging to 81 owners, including archaeological sites, public and diocesan museums, churches and places of worship, in a path that ranges from archeology to Bellini’s masterpieces, Cima Da Conegliano, Bronzino, up to to paintings by Manet, Boccioni and Pellizza da Volpedo.
The permanent exhibition itinerary, alongside the From Caravaggio to Gemito itinerary, offers the Intesa Sanpaolo collection of Attic and Magna Graecia ceramics, exhibited for the first time in its entirety, with important loans from the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, and a new itinerary dedicated to the art of the twentieth century.
In Arezzo, until 23 October the Ivan Bruschi Antiques House Museum pays homage to Antonio Canova, on the occasion of the second centenary of his death, exhibiting paintings and drawings from public and private collections of his contemporary, the painter Pietro Benvenuti. Aretino of origin, he was the protagonist of the international art scene during the years of the triumph of Neoclassicism. The exhibition «Pietro Benvenuti in the age of Canova». Paintings and drawings from public and private collections ”is the first exhibition of the Terre degli Uffizi exhibition program of the Uffizi Galleries and the CR Firenze Foundation. The exhibition also includes two works from the Intesa Sanpaolo collection, present in the Ivan Bruschi Antiques House Museum: Portrait of Teresa Mozzi del Garbo with her son from 1817 and Portrait of Antonio Capacci from 1818.
The Ivan Bruschi House Museum, unique in Italy as an antiques museum, a real “chamber of wonders” which has become part of the cultural heritage of Intesa Sanpaolo, presents a permanent exhibition curated by the Scuola Normale di Pisa that reveals the extraordinary variety of works collected by the antiquarian Ivan Bruschi in the course of a lifetime.
In Prato, the Gallery of Palazzo degli Alberti, open to the public on weekends, always with free admission, presents 142 works and 90 masterpieces on display by artists such as Bellini, Caravaggio, Bronzino, Filippo Lippi.
In a story full of pathos, the permanent exhibition curated by Lia Brunori – Superintendence of Archeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for Florence, Pistoia and Prato – tells the collection now owned by Banca Popolare di Vicenza SpA in LCA with a narrative start that, from two frescoed tabernacles of the early fifteenth century, continues with medieval pictorial representations that find the highest expression in the Madonna and Child by Filippo Lippi. In the Gallery you can also admire masterpieces by Caravaggio and works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Florentine area and the sculptures of Lorenzo Bartolini, an artist from Prato active in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The Galleria degli Alberti di Prato was opened in March 2022 by Intesa Sanpaolo, after three years of renovation work on the building owned by the Bank, to return to public use an important collection that belonged to the Cassa di Risparmio di Prato and therefore strongly linked to the territory.